Today the Scotch on the Rocks Speakers list was release by Andy Allan and his motley crew.

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I'm rubbish! I really am... I promise and I promise to keep on top of Blog Round-ups, but I never seem to quite manage it.

I would really like to keep writing this round-ups ever week, but its quite an effort. Can I persuade anyone to co-author these posts with me? Leave me a comment. Drop me an email. Shout me on Twitter.

Anyway, on with the round-up.

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This blog round up is somewhat later than I had intended, but for good reason.  I've been waiting for a couple of blog posts to emerge into the public domain, so that I could include them in the round up. I can't impress upon you how important it is to read these posts.

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I mentioned previously in my Scotch on the Rocks Reviews post that two of my colleagues did write-ups of their days and sessions at Scotch.

Well, here are those write-ups.

Both of these guys are Senior Developers in the company with very different backgrounds and projects. 
James' has been involved in projects like KPM Music's PLAY Production Music site.  Andy's been working on Enigma's SiteBuilder product and the impending version 2 release.  Their projects have had very different problems to solve and different technologies to solve those problems, giving them very different views of ColdFusion and CFML.

So anyway - enough waffle from me here are their write-ups. Enjoy.

James' summary:

Following my excursion to the Coldfusion conference in Edinburgh last Thursday, I have put together some notes that some of you may / may not be interested in.

The topics covered in this document are :

Modularizing your Flex Application with Cairngorm and Modules
Top level discussion on the best practices for the structure of medium to large Flex applications using design patterns such as MVC, Singletons and Observer. A basic understanding of Flash and Flex is required.

Document Driven Coldfusion 8
Dynamic data input and output using CF8 with PDF's. Using PDF's as an Offline data storage and form submission interface with CF8.

Getting to grips with Air and Aptana
AIR is the Adobe desktop application API. AIR applications are built using simple HTML, CSS, graphics and JavaScript. The AIR API also provides network access, client file system access, drag and drop style functionality and runs both on PC and Mac OS from the same executable file. Any JavaScript libraries including jQuery may be used to provide AJAX style web call functionality.

Coldfusion 8 Performance Monitoring & Alerts
Previously, CF7 servers could only be monitored using a third party monitor such as Coldfusion Reactor. CF8 now comes with a built in monitor and alerts system which can be launched through the CFIDE Server Monitoring tab

Also announced at the conference was the merge of JBoss and Railo and that Railo is to become open source. Everybody got very excited and clapped at this news but I didn't really understand! I am hoping Stephen is going to elaborate on this for me!

Download the notes

Andy's summary:

Event Driven Programming
A very nice paradigm for structuring applications The Modern Way - some excellent stuff here that we could all learn a lot from.

Keeping your Apps and Servers Healthy
A nice introduction to a variety of useful monitoring tools, some nice tips, and a preview of fusionAnalytics, which will be a must-have when it comes out.

Architecting Apps for Multiple UI Technologies
Harder to summarise, but some nice ideas for better designing one's application architecture to suit multiple UIs. Also some good general purpose programming guidelines

Advanced Model Glue
Some features of the Model Glue framework that many people (apparently) don't know exists. As I didn't know anything about Model Glue at all, I found this one very enlightening, and made me want to try a lot of the stuff mentioned.

Complementing CFML with Open Source Java.
The least useful of the lot, but still interesting. There's a lot of Java frameworks out there which can be used out-of-the-box with Coldfusion, and they're usually a lot more capable and fully featured than their CF equivalents (if such exist). They're also way more complex and a right pig to install.

Download the notes

I also wanted to mention a couple of people that didn't get the recognition that they deserved for their work and assistance at Scotch.  In no particular order, a big thank you to Leanne, Andy's better half, and Jatin Nanda (manager of the forthcoming UK RIA User Group) for all the work that they put into making Scotch a success behind the scenes before and during the conference.

Amazing news heard first at Scotch on the Rocks!
Railo has joined the jboss community! What does this mean?

Railo will be going to two versions. Railo Community, which will be Open Source under the lGPL licence and Railo Enterprise, which will include the likes of their new CFVideo tag and CFDocument tag.

Becoming part of the JBoss community opens up CFML to a huge new community of application developers with the possibility of integration with the likes of Hibernate and JBoss Cache with takes like cfdata and cfcache

Whether these tags see the light of day will be down to the Railo Community.

Why JBoss? Its a big Java community that can help much more with development of the application server. There are so many possibilities and to be honest some of it is a bit above my head, but be sure I will be reading up on it and watching what happens!

There's not much there at the minute, but you will be able to find Railo Community here : http://www.jboss.org/railo/ and I'll leave any more commentary to people more knowledgeable than myself.

Scotch has begun! The turn out is superb and despite a few minor problems everything seems to be going great!

I've just done a quick head count and it looks like we have about 130 delegates here at the minute. There are a bunch of unclaimed passes and a bunch of people that will be here on other days, so I think we're probably looking at more as the day goes by and on the other days.

I'm currently sitting in Matt Woodward's session on General OO, enjoying a little bit of a sit down after running around with Kev, Jatin, Andy and his better half, Leanne, making sure everything was ok for speakers in the first sessions.

We've had a couple of hiccups, but I think a lot of the lessons we learnt from last year's Scotch on the Rocks are coming in to play and definitely feels to be running smoother than last year.

Well, best sign off, soon be time for the next session... Who to look in on?? Peter Bell - requirements and Estimating or Nicolas Lieman - Web Analytics for the developer? I'll probably just float.

Hope everyone is enjoying the conference so far! Tonight's BOF on Open Bluedragon should be interesting!! Hope to see you there and catch up with as many of you as possible.

Last chance to get your early bird prices for Scotch on the Rocks!! Last chance to get £100 off the price of your ticket! 
Do it now! Tomorrow will be too late!

Find out about the speakers and topics that will be being discussed : http://www.scotch-on-the-rocks.co.uk/
There might even be some Open Bluedragon discussions that aren't on the agenda... Given that 4 of the committee members will be at the conference... ;)

Register and purchase your tickets here : http://www.scotch-on-the-rocks.co.uk/register/

Seven days left!  Thats all there is before the early bird discount ends.

We're into April now, so your boss should be now have budgets opened up for the new financial year.  Make him really happy by persuading him to buy your tickets to Scotch on the Rocks (probably the best conference you'll attend in the UK this year) NOW!  Right now!!  Before the end of the month, while the ticket prices are still at the early bird price.

Here's what you'll be missing out on if you don't get your tickets now.

That's right!  If you're coming to the full conference, paying for your ticket now will save your boss (or you) £100! (£117.50 if you can't claim the VAT back)

You know you want to!  You really don't want to miss out on a 3 day conference with a speaker list like this at these incredible prices!

• Adobe Consulting EMEA
• Charlie Arehart (Everyone's favourite CF expert)
  
• Sanjeev Kumar (From the ColdFusion Engineering team)
• Jason Delmore (ColdFusion Product Manager)
• Amir Shoval (From RADView)
• Nick Watson (Adobe's EuropeanTechnical Account Manager for ColdFusion, Flex and LiveCycle Data Services ES)
• Luca Mezzalira (Italian Flash Platform Developer)
• Neil Webb (Flash platform developer / flower arranger / erotic dance)
• Toby Tremayne (CF and Flex Developer based in Melbourne Australia)
• Andrew Shorten (Adobe Platform Evangalist)
• Adam Lehman (Adobe CF Specialist)
• Kai Koenig (Adobe Certified Master Instructor based in New Zealand)
  
• Ben Forta (No idea who this guy is)
• Peter Elst (ACE, Flash Instructor, Belgium AUG Manager)
• David Rutter (CTO Tag Worldwide)
• Duncan Jack (Openworld)
• Ian Bale (Celtic Internet)
• Simon Gladman (Development Director, Tag Worldwide)
• Neil Middleton (The man behind Feed-Squirrel)
• Gert Franz (Railo)
• Matt Woodward (ColdFusion Weekly Podcast)
• Sean Corfield
  
• Peter Bell (Application Generation)
  
• Scott Stroz (Alagad, CFSilence, CFSnippets)
  
• Joe Rhinehart (Model-Glue)
  
• Mark Drew (CFEclipse)

I'm absolutely sure I've missed some! And of course there's Jatin Nanda, Big Mad Kev, myself and, the man in the skirt, Andy Allan, who will be working working hard to make sure that this conference is everything you want it to be and more!

Visit the website to find out more about the speaker, the agenda, location and to BUY YOUR TICKETS while they are still cheap as chips! ;)